Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Laptop Withdrawal

Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my laptop died. Yes, I mean the laptop that was only purchased in July. It was working in the morning, I left to run errands, and came home to a non-functioning machine.

After spending over an hour on the phone with tech support (thank you God for Daniel in Indiana or something answering and speaking English!), it was determined that the hard drive had met an untimely death. Yippee... as it is clearly still under warranty, they sent me a new hard drive along with recovery disks to get the machine going. Those arrived after Thanksgiving, and then the new hard drive wouldn’t work either. It would start to load the recovery disks, then give a fatal error, then reboot itself. Over and over and over. This phone call to tech support landed in India to someone who didn't listen to the problem and merely assumed the recovery disks were bad and sent new ones. That’s not what online research was suggesting, and sure enough, 3 days later when the new disks arrived, I still had the same issue. Again, India answered the Help! call.*sigh* They sent a specific shipping box for me to send in the laptop so they can figure out where the problem is, and gave a 2 week estimate of when I'll get it back. The machine was sent in on Monday, so here’s hoping I can at least have it back by Christmas!

Ok, enough whining. Here’s a funny for you:A case manager – from America – called me after the 2nd India experience. He apologized for troubling me, but said he was having difficulty understanding the case notes on my account and could I please give him a synopsis of the problem. Nice. How much money are they really saving by outsourcing?? Not as much as they think, if they have to call people back anyway...